Did Hancock think people in care homes were already about to die?

Matt Hancock was grilled by disability groups today for not challenging the claim that people dying in care homes were “near the end regardless”.

In messages from 4 April 2020 shown to the inquiry, Hancock’s media adviser Jamie Njoku-Goodwin asked him about a “push on testing in care homes” and whether there should be “some sort of focused effort on testing”.

Njoku-Goodwin wrote: “I know it’s complex and the people dying in care homes are often people who were near the end regardless, but I worry that if a load of people in care start dying, there will be front pages demanding why we weren't testing people in care homes. Do we need to get ahead of this now?”

“Let’s have rapid advice on this, tying together all the angles,” was Hancock’s response.

Danny Friedman, a lawyer representing four disabled people’s organisations, put to the former health secretary: “You do not correct the misconception of your adviser that those in care homes include not just those who were near the end regardless but also disabled people who were not near the end but living in long-term care residential care or settings from a young age.

“Did you have that reality in the forefront of your mind at the time and, bluntly, why not correct your adviser of that serious misconception?”

Hancock said it was “absolutely” in the forefront of his mind, and said he had done a lot of work on the adult care sector before the pandemic and that he was simply “very busy”.

“The fact that [the reply] doesn't state all of that in no way implies that that wasn’t what I was thinking.”

He also defended his aide, arguing he was “coming at this from a comms angle in terms of what the newspapers might say”.

Friedman pointed out that 59% of people who died of Covid in the first wave were disabled. He also referred to NHS data from 2019, which found 841,850 people were receive long term adult social care support.

“For those aged between 18 and 64. The most common reason for support was learning disabilities – 45.5%, followed by physical support 29.2% and mental health support 20%”

Yesterday Hancock accepted the government had not thrown a “protective ring” around care homes, as he had said in 2020.

And in what was another day of being grilled about care homes for the former health secretary, the inquiry was shown evidence that made clear the risk to care homes was known well before the written direction from Hancock that hospitals should discharge Covid patients back into care homes on 17 March 2020.

Hancock said: “The only choices were between bad options” and said he had “gone over and over in my head the decisions we took.”

Over 20,000 care home residents died in the first wave of the pandemic, after some were being discharged while still infectious.

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